Many of the threads have been been answered with the indications that NetBeans is "replacing" the deploytool. But the details have been left out.

Part of the reason for this has been that we have been busy making them up (the details that is). Now that the details have started to gel into an implementation, it is time to let people see what we have been doing and let them try it out.

Use the Update Center item of Tools menu in a NetBeans 5.5 IDE daily build to add the "Archive Project" module to the IDE.

--- START PSA ---
If you are using the NetBeans 5.5 Beta or
the NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 EA, you will
need to read this important update with
information about registering the Development
update center.
--- END PSA ---

Update Center: page 1
Update Center:page 2

The module addds a new template to the Enterprise category of the New Project item of the File menu: Packaged Archive.

The first page of the New Project Wizard (afer adding the Archive Project module)

The "basis" for one of these new projects is a J2EE archive (like a war, rar, ear, ejb jar or application client jar). Each of these projects is also associated with an application server instance (or target).

The Packaged Archive wizard

Once the project is created it appears in the Project explorer. This images shows the logical view for a nontrivial J2EE application.
If you open a J2EE module archive, like an ejb-jar, war, rar or application client jar, the logical view of the project is simpler.

The deployment descriptor files associated with a module or application are available under the Config Files node.

Users are also able to associate resource definitions with the project, that are registered when the project is deployed.

The project has three main commands associated with it: Build, Verify and Deploy.

A packaged archive project also interacts "nicely" with Enterprise Applications. After you create a packaged archive project, you can add that project an Enterprise Application project. This is very useful if you need to alter the deployment descriptors that are in the prepackaged module to integrate it into your application and deployment environment.

If you want to test-drive the packaged archive project, you can download this ear file, which was created in NetBeans for deployment onto JBoss. The app is a variation of a 'web client calling an ejb method' Hello World.